Black fine line drawing of a slender botanical sprig with small clustered flowers and two leaves, shown as a flash design.

Fine line sprig with small flowers

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A slender stem branches upward into clusters of small, five-petalled flowers with buds at the tips. Two narrow leaves sit near the base of the stem, which extends down the page. The linework is thin and even, with the flower heads filled in solid black against a plain white background, and the sprig is centred with generous empty space around it.

Botanical Fine line Sprig Flower Leaves Stem Bud Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had the sprig in her apron pocket for three days before she admitted she could not name it. The carrier who brought the flour up the Ringle road had shaken it from a hedge bank at Cold Hollow and handed it over with the invoice, as if it were a receipt. Its heads were no bigger than peppercorns, five little petals each, and it had gone soft from her warm hand.

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The inn at Thorne Gate had been shut in by drifts since the Tuesday. Mr Pelham drank his brandy by the fire and read the parish ledgers aloud to nobody, and the two rooms let to the surveyors stayed locked. Nell pressed the sprig between the pages of the cookery book, under the recipe for barley broth, then went back to the kitchen to scrape frost from the windows so she could see the road.

On the fourth morning the snow stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Nell went out into the yard with the candle still lit and found the hedge bank bare to its roots, the stems black against the white. Along the edge of the drift, where the carrier had stood, the same small flowers were pushing through the crust, dozens of them, as if the ground had been keeping them under a sheet.

She carried the cookery book out and opened it at the broth. The sprig had flattened into the paper, faint as a watermark. Beside it, in her own hand, she wrote the name the carrier had given her, which she had only half heard: snowdrop, or something near it. She did not believe him. She left the page open to the air anyway.